aqotp: how to take breaks at the end of the world

this post, should it ever be public, is liable to self destruct.

i am in my pajamas. my pen feels like it has ice in it so enjoy my attempts at defrosting.

a quarry of thoughtless ponderments entitled: how to take breaks at the end of the (or, at least, my) world

aQoTP is a long-standing tradition in my personal journaling. i write out thoughts rolling about my head like loose marbles; sometimes they thread together. and today i am exhausted— even when i sleep well, i watch my body move untethered from my own purported peace of mind. everything is urgent; everything slips through the cracks in my glass.

• i take no breaks. i am so bad at breaks. today i am watching movies.

  • i recently gave one of my dearest loved ones a good conk by saying, “you need to take at least one day off a week!” and subsequently felt those words like a boomerang whap me upside the head right back. why don’t i feel like i can turn off? i am on until i run dry. leaving the faucet on from a dry well isn’t rest, it’s desperation. why am i desperate? what am i reaching for?

  • an adult i love (and have reverence/respect for) told me this moment haunts our particular youth— feeling like everything is happening all at once, everything must be given its proper urgency, everything hinges on our under-grown shoulders.

    • the tough part: in many ways, we’re right.

    • equally tough: our youth works against us in propelling us to urgencies. the problems we face today have always been urgent. the limits of youth manifest in our short-sighted mobility— we have not had time to accrue the life experience that trains longer, more steadfast vision.

      • and then! every adult i think is amazing, and i mean outright legendaric, is like, “you need to take more breaks. go easier on yourself.” but then when i ask them, “were you taking it easy when you were my age? would you be You today if you had?” it’s crickets. hmph.

  • here lies the point in writing where i figured out the title of this quarry of thoughtless ponderments. i do want the record to show that it was originally titled, “if i was a wiggly worm do you still think i could dance? like really hit that shit.”

• i have a long-standing tradition of watching short films on youtube when i’m sick (physically or metaphysically). short films specifically because my whole heart (and other squishy, vital organs) succumb to a ride of ample emotion in five to ten minutes. a whole world created and beheld in a couple breaths of time! how amazing. some days / some moments / some infinities are smaller than others.

  • the first time i binged short films, i was in my first year of high school. i was home with bronchitis, feeling like i was dying, having that meme regurgitated to me everywhere i looked for five seconds, because that's really when it was at its height. i had taken expired medicine because we could not afford a(nother) trip to urgent care, so I was like… maybe I am dying? it was a dice roll. this time i am watching short films in my pajamas because my mom has been diagnosed with cancer and

• *

  • • i’ma cc God on this email rq: why do all my parents keep navigating prolonged illness and death? how do i unsubscribe my life from the disney princess plotline? i am only twenty five i want my parents :(

      • sincerely have not wanted to cuss God out like this since i was a teenager. told a friend that and she said, “i feel like God would welcome that.” so:

        • (1) i have such deep appreciation for religiously-minded friends with no stake in blasphemy and

          • (2) how does one kick the almighty in the shins via prayer? like it’s not talking time. i want to beat ass. smiting be damned.

• my sense of urgency for the day to day has sincerely been gone for years. she died a quiet death sometime in undergrad when family kept dying and people kept expecting me to have respect for punctuality.

  • was telling the patrons¹ about how silly it is trying to motivate myself around deadlines. how do you just tell a non-governmental organization “it’s out when it’s out!! haha HAGS <3” like ismatu be so serious lmfao.

  • and yet :)

  • jk. big project incoming on saturday (inshallah)

  • this is a project that feeds people. revolutionary work breathes life again into feelings i thought were superfluous, especially the old adage of, oh, so you really think you're going to save the world, kid? i mean… maybe not the world, but i think i have pretty decent shots at my world. and i could delay this farther. you know, “my mom has cancer” is the best excuse in the world— but if I do, people will keep starving. really gets one’s ass up in the mornings.

    • (that and sleeping through suhur)

• i don’t have many pictures of my teenage life. i did not think anything was remarkable enough to take pictures. and teenagedom has this way of convincing you that you will be a teen forever— in spirit at minimum, even if not in physicality.

  • my heart so near the surface of my skin i could have moved it with my hand.

    • ^^ from one of my favorite poems ever, delores jepps by tim seibles. it’s the first poem i ever memorized and performed (that wasn’t my own).

• fifteen year old me has a lot of blooming lessons on how badly love hurts. the refrain was, “how do i love things that are temporary?”

  • what a teenage desire. “permanent.” as if.

    • loose answers from ten years later: you love them with the same vibrant glow you delight over nectarines with in the summer. you love like a bloom. like something born to be fragile and touched, like something unafraid of death since you, too, are sweet. hopefully in another ten years i’ll have something less… flowery to say. haha.

• i am in a current state where every bit of pleasure or joy in my life feels stolen. everything is urgent and yet i still must find a way to do this day, and the next, and the next. all my dreamings float untethered, above me, a mylar balloon running free through the stratosphere. it’s possible to rage against the machine and survive— if and only if you, too, manage to play the long game.

  • there’s a laundry list of reasons I am grateful for Baba Sekou’s presence in my life, most of which will stay in my heart/on my skin/encapsulated in my journals. and: one reason i told him immediately was, “you are alive.” at 79! ALIVE. so many of us ~idealistic youth~ swallow Hooverian propoganda: revolutionaries die young— past that, they’re all dead and gone. a thing of the past. I am still in the exposition of revolutionary unfoldings; my world has my fingerprints.

    • maybe the desire wasn’t to love something that’s permanent. maybe the desire was to love something that is beyond me. and the desire to be alive. you know?

• how? how do i think about decades when people are literally, physically lighting themselves on fire for the tragedies of today? what use are my silly words. what use is anything. pleasure feels like a betrayal of self.

• then: how? how do i wallow in tragedy and circumstance and the spectacle of mass death when those dying cry for us to love one another well? let me tell you what i’ve come to understand.

  • the day i learned about the cancer spots in my mother’s spine, i had just finished praying with my sister. i was walking to get supplies for fish stew. in a rare moment of internal narration (because I usually think in pictures), i wondered when i would cry about this. then, crossing onto fulton street, someone said, “oh! i follow you!” and i stopped to chat. recognized me through the mask. she asked me how i was and i burst into tears. all i managed was, “it’s been a really hard day.” they gave me about five hugs. and said general blessings over my life and day because graciously, blissfully, they did not ask me why. instead, they reminded me how much i mean to people. that’s very hard to believe, given the nature of life and death. (everything is urgent. what use are my silly words?) i said, trying to pull myself together, “please! i don’t wish to stop you from wherever you are going.” imagine me frantically, like, using the flats of my hands to rub tears off my face. and they said they were going to see their mom :( and i said, “give your mom a big hug for me.”

• when death finally occurs to you— when your day washes herself in fresh, bloody grief— you tell anyone who will listen to hold their beloved’s hands.

what’s the conclsuion? what’s the thesis? i am moving too quickly to be scared anymore. i spoke about this on live because i missed existing in public for a moment— the words someone came up with were impending acceleration. positive acceleration. it’s amazing to me how much i absolutely crave the temporary; i wish i had more pictures of myself from when I was a teenager, so i take pictures now and print them, even though i don’t believe in my body yet that twenty won’t last forever. i thought i would die young. i still might. i still marvel at being alive.

peace.

ismatu g.

(from the end of a true and proper sabbath)

1. everything on the patreon is free! everything i do is free :)